Man, I wish I had, because I could have asked Marc if it was his life-goal to turn David’s predictions into reality. Marc is well known for many things, but his recent mantra that “Software Is Eating the World” (Wall St. Journal paid link, more recent overview here) has become nearly everyone’s favorite Go-To Big Valley Trend. And for good reason – the idea seductively resonates on many different levels, and forms the backbone of not just Andreessen’s investment thesis, but of much of the current foment in our startup-driven industry.

A bit of background: Andreessen’s core argument is that nearly every industry in the world is being driven by or turned into software in one way or another. In some places, this process is deeply underway: The entertainment business is almost all software now, for example, and the attendant disruption has created extraordinary value for savvy investors in companies like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple. Further, Marc points out that the largest company in direct marketing these days is a software company: Google. His thesis extends to transportation (think Uber but also FedEx, which runs on software), retail (besides Amazon, Walmart is a data machine), healthcare (huge data opportunity, as yet unrealized), energy (same), and even defense. From his Journal article:

The modern combat soldier is embedded in a web of software that provides intelligence, communications, logistics and weapons guidance. Software-powered drones launch airstrikes without putting human pilots at risk. Intelligence agencies do large-scale data mining with software to uncover and track potential terrorist plots.

That quote reminds me of Wired’s first cover story, in 1993, about the future of war. But in 1991, two years before even that watershed moment (well, for me anyway), Yale scholar Gelernter published Mirror Worlds, and in it he predicted that we’d be putting the entire “universe in a shoebox” via software. Early in the book, Gelernter posits the concept of the Mirror World, which might best be described as a more benign version of The Matrix, specific to any given task, place, or institution. He lays out how such worlds will come to be, and declares that the technology already exists for such worlds to be created. “The software revolution hasn’t begun yet; but it will soon,” he promises.

As we become infinite shadows of data, I sense Gelernter is right, and VCs like Andreessen and the entrepreneurs they are backing are leading the charge. I’ll be reviewing Mirror Worlds later in the summer – I’m spending time with Gelernter at this home in New Haven next month – but for now, I wanted to just note how far we’ve come, and invite all of you, if you are fans of his work, to help me ask Gelernter intelligent questions about how his original thesis has morphed in two decades.

It seems to me that if true “mirror worlds” are going to emerge, the first step will have to be “software eating the world” – IE, we’ll have to infect our entire physical realities with software, such that those realities emanate with real time and useful data. That seems to be happening apace. And the implications of how we go about architecting such systems are massive.

One of my favorite passages from Mirror Worlds, for what it’s worth:

The intellectual content, the social implications of these software gizmos make them far too important to be left in the hands of the computer sciencearchy…..Public policy will be forced to come to grips with the implications. So will every thinking person: A software revolution will change the way society’s business is conducted, and it will change the intellectual landscape.

Content Marquee

It’s summertime, and if you’re not already lying on a beach somewhere, I’ve got a good reason for you to go: My friend Rob Reid’s new novel is out today, and it’s absolutely tailor made for beach reading. It’s called Year Zero, and it’s a hilarious send up of the music industry, mixed, naturally, with a ripping yarn about aliens, romance, and intergalatic politics.

Rob let me read an early-ish draft of the book, and I loved it. It’s his first novel, years in the making, and it’s a masterstroke.

Given all the headlines just this week about the music industry’s endless self-inflicted woes, Rob’s timing couldn’t be better. Here are just two, ripped from my favorite aggregator Media ReDEFined just this week:

It’s time to review how my Predictions 2012 are faring, now that half the year has slipped by (that was fast, no?).

One thing that stands out is the timing wrt Twitter – my first two predictions were about the company, and now that I think about it, given the news just this week (and the attendant debate), I should have realized how the two could be in direct conflict with each other. It all makes for some interesting chin stroking, which I’m busy doing while on vacation – fishing the Rio Blanco up above Meeker in Colorado. Yes, you may now give me shit for writing that.

Twitter will become a force as a media company, not just a platform for others’ media.

Well, we’re only six months in, but I’d say this is happening, full force. From expanded tweets to hosting photos and videos to creating brand pages to major deals with entertainment companies, Twitter is certainly becoming a major media company. I predicted it will improve its Discover feature (it continues to – this is and has been critical to its success with Promoted Tweets, esp. in mobile), and that it’d roll out something like Flipboard. That hasn’t happened yet, but I’d wager it’s coming….

Every major player on the Internet will have to do a deal with Twitter, and Twitter will emerge as a Swiss like, open, neutral player in the battle for the consumer web.

Hmmm. I am not sure if this is happening quite as I might have predicted. Just this past week, Twitter cut LinkedIn off, but that doesn’t mean a new deal isn’t in the works, or that the way the old deal was going made anyone at either company – or their customers – happy. On other fronts, Twitter is flowing through search results at Bing, but no renewed deal with Google yet. Twitter is on stronger footing with Facebook than it was before – with a reciprocal deal finally in place. But its moves in media might mean it begins to act in a protective, domain-specific way over the next six months. I hope not. In other news, this move – the Twitter Transparency Report – is sure welcome news. I wrote about this just a few weeks ago….and suggested Twitter might be next. See: Google’s Transparency Report: A Good And Troubling Thing

Well, it’s certainly looking like this is coming true. Not only has Facebook begun the process by allowing its ads to be shown on Zynga.com, it also has offered its own inventory up for third-party exchanges. Both moves augur a next step: a web-wide competitor to AdSense. I’m still a bit nervous this won’t happen this year, but I’d wager it’s going to come at some point soon.

Despite doing well overall, Google will fumble one big play this year.

Well, early in the year, the Search Plus Your World fracas seemed quite a fumble, but that tempest has cooled, at least for now. However, the company is the target of several government probes, and it remains to be seen how its perceived early missteps might play out.

OK, I mentioned Instagram as a probable candidate, but it’s not like that wasn’t pretty damn obvious if you were paying attention. I don’t have all the numbers in, but man, it’s been a huge year so far for M&A in our space. We’ll see by the end of the year if it’s a record.

We’ll all start to question what role the corporation plays in our society and culture.

This one is fuzzy to begin with – it’s hard to prove such a zeitgeisty prediction. A challenge to Citizens v. United failed to get the court’s attention, had it been reviewed, we’d certainly be talking about this issue a lot more. I’d wager I might be a bit early on this one.

One of my pet peeves about our industry is how slowly we change – I understand it takes a long time to gather consensus (it took three years to get AdChoices rolled out, for example) – but man, why don’t the big players, like Google, innovate a bit more when it comes to display advertising?

Well, yesterday Google did just that, announcing a “mute this ad” feature that it will roll out across its network over the next few months. The feature does what you might expect it to do – it stops a particular ad from “following” you around the web. It will look like this:

As you can see, the “mute this ad” is right next to the AdChoice icon, adding a bit more clutter to the creative, but also, more control for consumers, in particular those who find the practice of “retargeting” irritating.

…as I’ve said a million times, marketing is a conversation. And retargeted ads are part of that conversation. I’d like to suggest that retargeted ads acknowledge, with a simple graphic in a consistent place, that they are in fact a retargeted ad, and offer the consumer a chance to tell the advertiser “Thanks, but for now I’m not interested.” Then the ad goes away, and a new one would show up.

Well, it looks like Google has gotten with the program. Of course, Facebook already has that “X” on all of its display ads, but so far, retargeting hasn’t come to Facebook – yet. Watch that space, because I gotta believe it will soon.

Recently my site has been hit with a ton of “manual spam” – folks who are paid to post short comments in the hope they’ll appear and drive pagerank back to various sites (or perhaps just increase their or their clients’ visibility.) It’s not hard to kill these comments, though it’s a bit of an irritant when they pile up. I don’t really mind, because their full-blown amateur-hour earnestness is pretty entertaining. Besides leaving chuckleworthy comments like “Facebook now 100 billion company there big really now”, the spammers also leave behind their user handles, which are simply priceless. Enjoy:

I’ll admit it, I’m one of those people who has a Google News alert set for my own name. Back in the day, it meant a lot more than it does now – the search results used to pick up blog mentions as well as “regular” news mentions, and before FacebookLand took over our world (and eschewed Google’s), a news alert was a pretty reliable way to find out what folks might be saying about you or your writing on any given day.

Like most folks who maintain a reasonably public conversation, I now watch Twitter’s @replies far more than I do Google news alerts. Of course, Twitter doesn’t catch everything, so I never unsubscribed from my Google News alert.

Yesterday, one came over the transom, and it kind of crushed me. “The End of the Tech Conference?” it asked. The opening line was included in the snippet: “The heartbreak was palpable when John Battelle announced via blog post back in April that the Web 2.0 Summit would not be held for the first time since its debut in 2004.”

The funny thing is, while I think the writer intended to describe the Web 2 community’s “heartbreak” – certainly an arguable supposition given how overwhelmed our industry is with conferences – what she may not have realized is how close to home the line hit for me. When I read it, I felt my own loss – it’s difficult to stop doing something you’ve done well and for a long time. In my case, I’ve hosted a gathering of Internet industry leaders nearly every year since 1998 (before Web 2, there was The Industry Standard’s “Internet Summit”). That’s a decade and a half. Not doing it is far harder than I thought.

I took the decision to step away from the Web 2 Summit as inevitable for two main reasons. First, I needed to work on the book, and there didn’t seem to be room for such an ambitious project if I kept my two other day jobs (Web 2 and Federated Media Publishing). Web 2 takes an extraordinary amount of time to do – with nearly 70 speakers and three days of programming, my life very quickly becomes overwhelmed with research, production calls, and pre-interviews, not to mention all the sales, operations, and marketing work.

Second, I had been doing Web 2 for a long time, and I wanted to step away and look at it with fresh eyes – let it lay fallow, so to speak. Stop tilling and seeding the same soil, let it repair, in the most catholic interpretation of the word (“repair” derives from the Latin “to go home”). And it’s this part that’s been really hard. It’s a natural cycle of grief, in a way – I’m probably deep in the trough of sorrow right now – but I do kind of miss the work.

In other words, it’s hard to lay fallow.

But the beauty of a fallow field is what’s going on underneath. If you trust yourself enough, you’ll realize all kinds of seeds are competing to push through and gather the resources of your attention. I’m learning that it takes a lot of will power to let that process run its course. I find myself “watering” all sorts of potential new growth ideas. I’m not sure which will take root, which are weeds, and which might yield the wrong crop, so to speak. And that’s scary.

But it’s also good. If you’re not a little scared, you’re not really paying attention, are you?

Meanwhile, I can report that I *will* be involved in a new kind of gathering this Fall, one that I can’t yet announce, because it involves many other wonderful partners. It’s not a typical tech conference, and it’s certainly not on par with Web 2 in terms of commitment or time – either from me or the attendees. But it’s a seed, one I’m happy to be cultivating. Stay tuned for more on that soon.

Yay! It's a nameless hotel ballroom! But the people who fill it are what matter...

I had one of those kind of days yesterday that reaffirm my belief in our industry, in its people, and in the work I do.

It’s not easy to sit here and write, much less write a book, and I’ll admit lately my faith (and my productivity) has flagged – there’s so much work left to do, so little time in which to do it, and so many other things – Federated Media, conferences, board positions, family, new business ideas – competing for my attention.

Fortunately I had reserved yesterday for a Valley reporting day. I managed to drag myself out of my recently-unproductive writer’s lair and into the bright sunlight of Sand Hill Road, Sunnyvale, and Palo Alto. I was fortunate to meet with some of the smartest folks in the business, and as I did, I relaized how easy it is to shake yourself out of a funk: Just get the hell out of your routine, pick up the phone, make a few appointments, and go talk to some interesting folks.

I’ll give you another example. Last week I went to Chicago for a joint board meeting between the IAB (where I am a board member), the Association of National Advertisers, and the 4As (that stands for the American Association of Advertising Agencies). I’ll admit I really didn’t want to go. I have come to hate business travel because it interrupts the flow of creation – I find it nearly impossible to write anything if I have to take the majority of the week to drive to the airport, get frisked, eat crap food on an airplane, then spend a couple of days in an airless, soul-sucking ballroom that practically drips with the steamed ghosts of ten thousand badly cooked chickens. Lather, rinse and repeat for the trip back. Ugh.

Only…once I settled into the meeting, I learned more in two days than I ever could from two weeks sitting in front of this screen. I got far smarter on the issues of marketing measurement, self regulation, and Do Not Track. I serendipitously managed to do some due diligence on a business I’ve been looking into. I gathered some critical intel on another deal I’ve been working, met a handful of senior people in the marketing industry I’ve been meaning to get to know, had lunch with an old colleague with whom I’d have otherwise never connected, and even managed to take a long run in the woods of Northbrook, Illinois, during which I happened upon a family of raccoons happily climbing a tree.

I left both excursions feeling like I had far more to say than when I began. And that’s my point. When you’re stuck, get out and talk to people. It always works for me.

Every year I write predictions, and every July 1 or so, I see how I’ve been doing. So I went back to my 2012 predictions, and nope, it wasn’t there. Ah, time flies….it was in 2011 that I wrote, as Prediction #6:

Apple will attempt to get better at social networking, fail, and cut a deal with Facebook.

I was only off by six months! My half-year “how’m I doing?” post will be out soon….

Morse successfully demonstrated his telegraph between Baltimore and Washington DC in May of 1844. Three days later the Democratic party convention commenced in Baltimore. In what turned out to be a masterstroke of “being in the right place at the right time,” Morse’s telegraph line happened to be in place to relay news of the convention back to the political classes in DC.

Recall, this was at a time when news was carried by horseback or, in the best case, by rail. It took hours for messages to travel between cities like Baltimore and DC – and they were just 45 miles apart.

Adding to the sensationalism of the telegraph’s public debut, the Democratic convention of 1844 was fraught with controversy and political implication – candidates’ fortunes turned on nation-changing issues such as whether to reclaim Oregon from the British, and whether to annex Texas into the Union, which had serious implications for a growing movement for the abolition of slavery.

Remember, this was 15 years before the Civil War began, and just 30-odd years after the war of 1812, during which the British torched the House of Representatives.

Morse, who by his fifties had endured nearly a dozen years of false starts, failures, near-bankruptcy, and more, turned out to be a master publicist. He positioned his partner Alfred Vail at the convention and himself near Congress. Vail began sending regular reports on the convention to Morse, who was surrounded by hundreds of reporters, Senators, and other dignitaries in DC. News came in short bursts familiar to anyone who’s spent time on Twitter or Facebook. In the “conversation,” most likely the first of its kind to report news in real time, all of Washington learned that the “dark horse” candidate James Polk, who supported bringing Texas into the Union, would prevail.

It makes for fascinating reading, with a funny kicker at the end:

V[ail] Mr. Brewster of Pa is speaking in favour of Buchanan

M[orse] yes….

V Mr Brewster says his delegation go for VB but if VB’s friends desert them, the Delegation go for Buchanan…. The vote taken will be nearly unanimous for J K Polk & harmony & union are restored

M Is it a fact or a mere rumor

V Wait till the ballot comes…. Illinois goes for Polk … Mich goes for Polk. Penn asks leave to correct her error so as to give her whole vote for Polk….

M Intense anxiety prevails to … hear the result of last Balloting

V Polk is unanimously nom

M 3 cheers have been given here for Polk and 3 for the Telegraph.

V Have you had your dinner

M yes have you

V yes what had you

M mutton chop and strawberries

And so began a revolution in communications and industry. But even back then, folks shared both the extraordinary and the mundane across the wires….

Part of the research I am doing for the book involves trying to get my head around the concept of “Big Data,” given the premise that we are in a fundamental shift to a digitally driven society. Big data, as you all know, is super hot – Facebook derives its value because of all that big data it has on you and me, Google is probably the original consumer-facing big data company (though Amazon might take issue with that), Microsoft is betting the farm on data in the cloud, Splunk just had a hot IPO because it’s a Big Data play, and so on.

But I’m starting to wonder if Big Data is the right metaphor for all of us as we continue this journey toward a digitally enhanced future. It feels so – impersonal – Big Data is something that is done to us or without regard for us as individuals. We need a metaphor that is more about the person, and less about the machine. At the very least, it should start with us, no?

Elsewhere I’ve written about the intersection of data and the platform for that data – expect a lot more from me on this subject in the future. But in short, I am unconvinced that the current architecture we’ve adopted is ideal – where all “our” data, along with the data created by that data’s co-mingling with other data – lives in “cloud” platforms controlled by large corporations whose terms and values we may or may not agree with (or even pay attention to, though some interesting folks are starting to). And the grammar and vocabulary now seeping into our culture is equally mundane and bereft of the subject’s true potential – the creation, sharing and intermingling of data is perhaps the most important development of our generation, in terms of potential good it can create in the world.

At Web 2 last year a significant theme arose around the idea of “You Are the Platform,” driven by people and companies like Chris Poole, Mozilla, Singly, and many others. I think this is an under-appreciated and important idea for our industry, and it centers around, to torture a phrase, the idea of “small” rather than Big Data. To me, small means limited, intimate, and actionable by individuals. It’s small in the same sense that the original web was “small pieces loosely joined” (and the web itself was “big.”) It’s intimate in that it’s data that matters a lot to each of us, and that we share with much the same kind of social parameters that might constrain a story at an intimate dinner gathering, or a presentation at a business meeting. And should we choose to share a small amount of intimate data with “the cloud,” it’s important that the cloud understand the nature of that data as distinct from its masses of “Big Data.”

An undeveloped idea, to be sure, but I wanted to sketch this out today before I leave for a week of travel.